Berkeley Bans Off-Campus Political Advocacy on Campus, Sparks Free Speech Movement
Administrators at the University of California, Berkeley on this day informed student organizations that advocacy of off-campus political activity would be prohibited on campus.
The restrictive policy provoked the Free Speech Movement, the first significant student protest of the 1960s, which provided the model for campus protests against the Vietnam War in the Sixties. See the first “Teach-In” against the Vietnam War at the University of Michigan on March 24, 1965.
The two pivotal events in the Free Speech Movement: the arrest of Jack Weinberg on October 1, 1964, and Mario Savio’s famous speech denouncing “the system” on December 2, 1964.
Read: David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s (1993)
Learn more; see the original documents from the Free Speech Movement: http://www.fsm-a.org/
Read the biography of Savio: Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (2009)
Learn about the 100 Year fight for free speech in America: Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone, The Free Speech Century (2018)